RETURN FROM ZOMBIELAND

OR 6 MONTHES OF WORKING NIGHT SHIFT! September 2009 thru February 2010

On our last realignment or bid, I picked a night run delivering Sam’s Clubs. I would start at noon Sunday thru Thursday and work into the wee hours of the night 01:00-02:00. Although I was usually home and in bed by 02:30 most nights. It was a pretty demanding schedule, leaving Red Bluff for Sacramento to deliver a Wal-mart store then up to Woodland to the Sam’s DC. Then I would deliver 3 Sam’s Clubs returning to Woodland between each Club delivery. The 3 Clubs were in Citrus Heights, Sacramento and Folsom. As if that wasn’t enough I would then stop at our West Sacramento Relay Yard and do a Yard check and pick up a back-haul for Red Bluff. Throw in 2 half hour lunch breaks, mandatory by the lovely State of California.

I was given a brand new day-cab International truck for this run as the Sacramento Sam’s Club is off of Watt Ave and is restricted to a 65 foot length limit. It was a pretty nice truck except for one thing, an 80 gallon fuel tank. This was just barely big enough to finish my run of 460 miles on the best of days. To be safe I would stop and fuel the truck just north of Sacramento putting on 13 to 14 gallons to insure my safe return to Red Bluff. Then I would have to stop by fuel island and fill up the tank again. One nice thing is we have fuelers that fuel, check the oil and tire pressures and will wash our windows if needed.

The bad part of this night run is not see my wife. She would be in bed asleep when I got home and then would get up and go to work while I slept. See has Saturday and Sundays off and I was off Friday and Saturdays. Leaving us a very short weekend together. I also seemed never to be able to get much done as it seem all I did was Sleep and work. This makes for one heck of a Zombie Life Style.

I’ve been off the run for a month now and am starting to get some stuff done, at least I want to start working on this site more and my other site http://truckerrich.com . I was not able to listen to very many Podcast as I had no way to connect to my stereo. Head phone were a pain as I was in and out of the truck so much. My new run is a much more normal run. Delivering 2 stores a day and usually only needing to take one lunch break. I can return home to my Bride and have dinner and watch some TV before retiring for the night. I’m looking forward to getting one of the new Peterbilt trucks that will be arriving soon. I’ll leave that for an other post, you all come back soon!